Gemless combat magic

[Makinus]

It appears that all the cool combat magics use gems, but i´m a miser, i like to use gems to other things (rituals, forging, etc.), so, there are any early, mid and/or late game combat strategies with spells that don´t use any gems?

Other reason to use gemless magic combat spells is because of the AI that sometimes uses gems in spells that don´t need them, so, any good ideas?

[licker]

Lots of fire and lightning evocations.

Skelespam

Various buffs

There's plenty of non gem combat magic, just a question of what exactly you are trying to do and with what nation.

It's easy to set up thunderstrike (or orb lightning) spam with various air nations.

Same with falling fires/flare/fireball for various fire nations.

Also all the astral 100 accuracy spammy spells to deal with thugs/SCs (and things like incinerate or frozen heart there as well).

[JimMorrison]

There are indeed lots of things you can do without expending gems.

However, many of those things culminate in a battlefield wide version that requires gems, and saves you an incredible amount of casting time and Fatigue. Low path mages can put out an incredible amount of evocations, if you rely on only a couple high path mages to do battlefield buffs.

Also, for example, Light of the Northern Star buffs all Astral by +1, enabling your Astral spammers to access higher spells, or to cast for longer, or to get penetration bonus.

I think the key to remember is to keep it simple at first. Have a scout carry some extra gems, or just place extras on a commander/mage that lacks the path to use them. The management of this adds a little difficulty, but it's not that much work to get a couple of large effects added to an important army, and the investment can pay for itself hugely (especially if you use a lot of summons, why would you not want them all Regenerating, or....?).

[Fate]

Most combat spells don't require gems (its just the army killing/battle field wide/blood magic spells that require gems).

That said, those same spells are mostly limited to use as buffs on your thugs/SCs or spamming.

Low level Alteration buffs (especially E/N/S) can be spammed on your elite/trampling troops to great effect (and can also turn that chaff army into an elite uber-force). Mid-level evocations (and even some low ones) can make a real difference, especially when you hit a critical mass of mages (varies depending on spell/target, but I find few early armies can withstand, say, 3-6 mages spamming Thunderbolt).

You might also want to look into Linebacker communions (see Baalz's excellent communion guide). Any nation with strong (in melee) astral commanders (admittedly, not many) or access to quick, cheap matrices can make good use of them.

For death nations (I'm looking at you, LA C'Tis) I have been soundly dumbfounded more than once by a simple skelly spam (Ench 4 I believe).

Thaum 4 also gives nice things like gift of flight, regeneration, battle frenzy (use at your own risk).

In general, though, I find that gem-less spells are weaker than their gem-costing counterparts. And you know what you lack in quality you must make up in quantity...

[llamabeast]

Oh yeah, just try Falling Fires with Marignon/Abysia, Thunderstrike with Caelum or Raise Skeletons with EA/LA C'tis and you'll see gemless combat magic can be pretty brutal.

I'd say most combat spells are gemless really. You generally just want at most a few key gem-using spells, even for big battles. Of course in emergencies it's certainly possible to use more gems with some benefit, e.g. for Shadow Blast.

[LDiCesare]

Fire: evocations (fire ball, falling fires...).
Air: evocations (thunder strike, lightning bolt...).
Death: skelly spam, ghost grip, some fear spells.
Astral: body ethereal, luck, soul slays, enslave mind...
Nature: Not much imho. Some buffs, panic, vine arrows.
Water: Some evocations.
Blood: Zilch.
Earth: Destruction, Blade Wind.

There are other spells, but these seem the most common/cheap to me (it'snot always easy to cast astral fires for instance).

[Dragar]

Blood has 1 actually, blood boil perhaps? B1F1, high fatigue but it's something when you have no slaves, packs a heavy punch

[Poopsi]

Also, for example, Light of the Northern Star buffs all Astral by +1, enabling your Astral spammers to access higher spells, or to cast for longer, or to get penetration bonus.

that's one spell I find only partially useful. Isn't it better to just have someone lug around a banner of the northern star?

[Sombre]

Oh come now, I think you can work out some reasons why people might cast light of the northern star.

[Poopsi]

The only one I can think of is that they havent teched up to constructing banners yet.